What drives the digitized world?
What runs the online businesses; the wireless enterprises; the web marketplaces; the E-commerce platforms; the entire modern business world (mostly app and web-based)?
Just the entrepreneurs?
No.
The skilled human resources?
No.
It’s data!
Gigabytes of data streams make to-and-fro trips across the internet with each passing second. Billions of binary codes (encoding the data packets) move around millions of both wired and wireless media, across thousands of web addresses. Everything is data… each click, each web search, each cookie, each pop-up… everything.
So, with the enormous piling-up of data, the next concern that should be particularly and infallibly addressed is – data protection!
As a startup, you should vehemently realize and never underestimate the power of data. Its use as well as misuse. Data warehousing, storage, and its security should be the priority and must be included as a policy matter under confidentiality provisions. Your clients and customers will surely be retained if and when they are confident about the protection of the data (mostly personal information like name, address, E-mail ID, account’s login username, account’s login password, card details, etc.) they provide you.
Modern data protection provisions mostly include high-end encryption involving multi-level security checkpoints that appear too much prompting, but they are for your client’s and customer’s benefits only. Data protection adds an additional layer of customer/client delight to the already existing benefits that your startup provides.
Always remember: Breakthroughs begin with new thinking!
Recently a virus code, named WannaCry Ransomware (May 2017), launched a worldwide cyber-attack that attacked the computer systems running on Microsoft Windows. This crypto worm encrypted the personal data of users and demanded ransom payments in the Bitcoin crypto-currency. More than 200,000 systems across 150 countries were affected by it. The most important concern of the businesses during this cyber-attack was the protection of data.
The statement is popularly known from a Hollywood movie: Always have contingency plans!
And when the question is choreographed around the data protection, why not have such plans ready-at-hands?
The answer rests with smart data backup!
Data backups are a routine thing for businesses. As startups, if you’re delaying the data backup of your clients/customers; you’re gradually waning the possible chances of retaining a significant percentage of them. Data breaches and Data jeopardizing are the most undesirable things happening to the customers/clients. As startups, you need to be extra careful with the handling of data. Any breach would directly have an ill-effect to your startup’s reputation, its business integrity, the in-house organizational structure, your business relations with potential clients, etc.
It’s not at all a healthy sign for the growing businesses & budding entrepreneurs.
Data protection is seriously not a lightweight thing nowadays because clients/customers are much more digitally educated and are quite aware of the concerns and provisions related to data security and breach; if not technically detailed then at least mildly notional.
Another point of concern is the issue of data mobility!
Efficient data mobility enables and paves the way toward advanced data management functions such as regulatory compliance.
Data deduplication (dedupe) is one more critical and significant provision under data protection that enables cloud-based data recovery. Dedupe provides the foundation for data mobility. It is a feature expected in enterprise-class storage systems. Modern data protection products improve their services by implementing object- and block-level dedupe.
Summarizing these data protection/security aspects, the following list can be prepared: –
- Data management
- Data mobility
- Access control
- Backup and recovery
- Data lifecycle management
Data protection can be achieved through:
- Software only or
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Solutions based on Software only include the known and traditional approaches towards providing data security like CommVault & Avamar.
SaaS is mostly for cloud-based services like Druva Inc. & Carbonite.
Although there’s one more category of data protection products called – Appliances; these include both storage and software provisions for data security. Its products are – Cohesity & Rubrik.
Modern data protection platforms also include Metadata; a capability enabler to gain real-time ID of the location of data. In most advanced systems, it allows indexing the content of data distributed worldwide.
Lastly, data recovery is the last aspect included under data protection. Even if data backup malfunctions or any unwanted breach happens, data recovery strategies always help you to regain the lost data as well as the trust of clients/customers. Backend storage of data is now being advanced to the solution based on IP storage protocols. Even the solution for direct integration of user data with public cloud providers has been recently started to get implemented. Advanced capabilities now allow automated recovery of crucial data.
Startups and budding entrepreneurs need not worry about the concerns related to data protection. However, it is also not a concern to avoid at any cost. Where there are bottlenecks, there are solutions. The trick is to find and then implement them appropriately and timely.
